Time's Eye (8 page)

There was, of course, no answer.

Captain Grove came bustling up. “Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bisesa. “You’ll remember the scouting patrols I’ve been sending out—one of the
sowars
has reported something rather odd, to the north of here.”

“ ‘Odd,’ ” Casey said. “God love your British understatement!”

Grove was unperturbed. “You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps . . . I wondered if you fancied a short excursion?”

11: STRANDED IN SPACE

“Hey, asshole, I need the john.” That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment, welcoming Kolya to another day.

He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few moments to realize where he was.
Oh. I am still here.
Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.

He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them—they could hardly open the hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way, stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the “Cossack jockstraps,” as Sable had put it.

He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet, opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet breaks hadn’t been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.

Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize the
Soyuz
’s endurance Musa had ordered that only essential systems should be run, at minimum power. So the ship had become progressively cold and damp. Black mildew was growing over the walls. The air, increasingly foul, was thick with dust, flaked-off skin, shaved-off bristle, and food debris, none of which, of course, settled out in the absence of gravity. Their eyes were gritty, and they all sneezed, all the time; yesterday Kolya had timed himself, and found he suffered twenty sneezes in a single hour.

The tenth day, he thought. Today they would complete another sixteen pointless orbits of the Earth, bringing their grand total, since the Station had winked out of existence, to perhaps a hundred and sixty.

He fixed his braslets to the tops of his legs. These elastic straps, a guard against fluid imbalances caused by microgravity, were adjusted to be tight enough to restrict the flow of fluids out of his legs, without being so tight that they stopped the flow in. Kolya pulled on his jumpsuit—actually another discard he had found in the trash piles in the living compartment.

Then he clambered down through the open hatch and into the descent compartment. Neither Musa nor Sable met his eyes; they were sick of the sight of each other. He swiveled in the air and slid into his left-side couch with a practiced ease. As soon as he was out of the way Sable pushed herself up through the hatch, and Kolya heard her banging around.

“Breakfast.” Musa pushed a tray through the air toward Kolya. On it were taped tubes and cans of food, already opened, half-eaten. They had long since finished up the small stash of food aboard the
Soyuz,
and had broken into the emergency rations meant to sustain them after they landed: tins of meat and fish, squeeze tubes of creamed vegetables and cheese, even a few boiled sweets. But it was hardly filling. Kolya ran his finger over every empty tin, and sucked stray crumbs out of the air.

None of them were very hungry anyhow. The strange conditions of weightlessness ensured that. He did miss hot food, though, which he had not enjoyed since leaving the Station.

Musa had already begun his steady, determined working of the comms system. “Stereo one, Stereo one . . .” Of course there was no reply, no matter how many hours he spent at the task. But what choice was there but to keep trying?

Sable meanwhile was bustling around “upstairs” in the living compartment. She had discovered the components of an old ham radio rig, which the Station astronauts had once used to contact amateurs across the planet, especially schoolchildren. Public interest in the Station had long waned, and the Station’s aging gear had been disassembled, boxed up and packed into the
Soyuz
for destruction. Now Sable was trying to make it work. Perhaps they would pick up signals, or even be able to send broadcasts, on wavelengths the conventional gear couldn’t handle. Musa, almost routinely, had grumbled when she wanted to hook the gear up to the spacecraft’s power supply. Another blazing argument had ensued, but on this occasion Kolya had intervened. “It’s a long shot, but it might work. What harm can it do? . . .”

Kolya leaned forward and pressed the valve of the water tank. A globule a few centimeters across emerged and headed toward his face. Aware of Musa watching greedily—there would be a row if he wasted a single drop—Kolya opened his mouth wide. The water broke on his tongue, and he held it in his mouth, savoring its freshness, before swallowing it. Of all the rationing regimes Musa had imposed, the water was the hardest to bear. The
Soyuz
had none of the Station’s recycling facilities; designed for short-duration hops from Earth to orbit and back, it was equipped only with a small water tank. But Sable had characteristically argued. “Even when you’re in a desert you don’t ration your water. You drink it down when you need it. There’s no other way . . .” Right or wrong, the water was running out anyhow.

He dug out a tooth cleaner from a compartment on the wall. This was a bit of muslin impregnated with highly flavored toothpaste that you slipped over your finger and worked around your mouth. Kolya used this carefully, sucking every last bit of minty flavor out of the scrap of cloth; somehow the taste seemed to assuage his thirst a little.

And that was his day begun. He couldn’t wash, for they had long since run out of the soft flannels that you usually used to wash your body and your hair. No doubt they all smelled as bad as the Cossack jockstraps upstairs. But at least they were all the same.

As Musa continued to call plaintively into the dark, Kolya turned to his own self-appointed program of work, which was a study of the Earth.

In his long hours in space, Kolya had always derived great pleasure from watching Earth. The Station, like
Soyuz
now, orbited only a few hundred kilometers above the surface, so to him the planet had none of the sense of isolation and fragility that the travelers to Mars reported, when they looked back at the blue island where they had been born. To Kolya Earth was huge—and all but empty.

Half of every orbit took him over the great wastes of the Pacific, a sky-blue expanse broken only by the wakes of occasional ships, a dusting of islands. Even land masses were mostly empty of people: across Asia and north Africa the deserts stretched, unmarked save by the smoke of an occasional campfire. Human habitation was confined largely to the coasts, or the river valleys. But even cities were difficult to make out from orbit; when he searched for Moscow or London, Paris or New York, he might make out only a bubbling grayness, fading into the green-brown of the countryside beyond.

It was not the fragility of the Earth that impressed him, then, but its immensity; and it was not the grandeur of man’s conquest of the planet that was so obvious, but the smallness of human tenure, even in the mid-twenty-first century.

But all that was before the metamorphosis.

He clung to what was familiar. The geometry of Earth seen from low orbit was unchanged: every ninety minutes he could watch the sun rise with startling swiftness through the layers of atmosphere, the light brightening from crimson, orange, to yellow, in smoothly curving bands. And the shapes and positions of the continents, the deserts, the distribution of the mountains in their ranges—all those were much as they had been.

But beneath those sunrises, within the frames of the continents, there were many peculiarities.

There had been shifts in the patterns of the ice sheets. Over the Himalayas, he could clearly make out glaciers pouring off the sides of the mountains, clawing their way toward the lower ground. The Sahara, meanwhile, had not remained a desert, not entirely. Here and there new oases had sprung up, patches of green that could be fifty kilometers on a side, bordered by straight-line segments. Similarly he observed bits of desert somehow stuck into the green expanses of the South American rain forests. The world was suddenly a clumsy patchwork. But those odd patches of green in the desert were already fading, he observed as the days wore on, the greenery browning, visibly dying.

If the effects of the changes on the physical world were relatively subtle, the impact on humanity was dramatic.

By day the cities and farms had always been hard to make out from orbit. But now even the great roadways that had once spanned the red center of Australia had vanished. Britain, its shape easily recognizable, seemed to be covered from the Scottish borders to the Channel coast by a thick blanket of forest: Kolya recognized the Thames, but it was much broader than he remembered, and there was no sign of London. Once Kolya made out a bright orange-yellow glow in the middle of the North Sea. It appeared to be a burning oil rig. A great black plume of smoke rose from it and feathered out over Western Europe. As their radio footprint crossed over, Musa tried desperately to make radio contact. But there was no reply, and no sign of ships or planes coming to the aid of the stricken rig.

And so on. If the day side of the world was transformed, the night side was heartbreaking. The city lights, once glowing necklaces around the necks of the continents, were gone, all extinguished.

Everywhere he looked it was the same—save for a few, a very few exceptions. In the middle of a desert, he would make out the spark of a campfire, though he had learned he could be fooled by lightning-struck blazes. There was a denser scattering of fires in Central Asia, near the Mongolian border. There even seemed to be a city in what had been Iraq, but it was small and isolated, and at night its glow was flickering, as if from fires and lanterns, not electricity. Sable claimed she saw some signs of habitation at the site of Chicago. Once the
Soyuz
crew was excited by the glimpse of an extensive glow along the western seaboard of the continental United States. But that turned out to be a tectonic fault, rivers of lava pouring from a ruptured ground, soon obscured by great billows of ash and dust.

To a first approximation, humanity was gone: that was all you could say about it. And as for Kolya’s own family, Nadia and the boys, Moscow had vanished; Russia was empty.

The crew cautiously discussed what could have caused this tremendous metamorphosis. Perhaps some great war could have left the world depopulated; that seemed the most likely hypothesis. But if so, surely they would have heard the military commands, seen the sparks of ICBMs rising, heard desolate cries for help—seen cities burn, God help them. And what possible force could pick up blocks of ice or tracts of green, dozens of kilometers on a side, and plant them so out of place?

These discussions never went very far. Perhaps they all lacked the imagination to deal with what they saw. Or perhaps they feared that by talking about it they would somehow make it real.

Kolya tried to be analytical. The
Soyuz
’s external sensor pod was functioning well. Designed to photograph the Station’s exterior, the pod had a virtually unlimited electronic capacity for storing images. It had been easy for Kolya to reconfigure the pod so that it pointed downward at the Earth. The
Soyuz
’s orbit, a shadow of the vanished Station’s, did not cover the whole planet, but it did loop far from the equator, and as the Earth turned beneath them so new segments of the planet were brought into the cameras’ view. Kolya would be able to create a photographic record from orbit of the state of Earth, covering a great swath to north and south.

Patiently, as the lonely
Soyuz
circled, Kolya tried to put aside preconceptions, to control his emotions and his fears, and simply to record what he saw, what was there. But it was strange to think that somewhere in the pod’s vast electronic memory were stored the images of the Station they had taken just after separation—images of a Station now somehow vanished, its loss a grace note in the unfolding symphony of strangeness around them.

Sable demanded to know what was the point of this patient recording. Her ham radio project, by comparison, was aimed at establishing communications that could enable them to survive; what use were all these images? Kolya didn’t feel the need to justify himself. There was surely nobody else in a position to do it—and Earth, he felt, deserved a witness to its metamorphosis.

And besides, as far as he knew, his wife and boys were gone. If that were true, then what was the point of
anything
they did?

The climate seemed restless: great low pressure systems prowled the oceans, and pushed their way toward the land, spinning off huge electrical storms. Seen from space the storms were wonders, with lightning flickering and branching between the clouds, releasing chain reactions that could span a continent. And at the equator clouds stacked up in great heaps that seemed to be straining toward him, and sometimes he imagined the
Soyuz
might plunge into those thunderheads. Perhaps the sea and the air had been as churned up as the land. As the days wore by the seeing slowly worsened. But, oddly, the increasing obscurity made him feel better about his situation—as if he was a child, able to believe that the badness had gone away if he couldn’t see it.

When it got too hard to bear Kolya would turn to his lemon tree. This tree, bonsai small, had been the subject of one of his experiments on the Station. After the first day in the
Soyuz
he had dug it out of its packaging and now kept it in the little space under his seat. One day, aboard great liners sailing between the worlds, people would have grown fruit in space, and Kolya might have been remembered as a pioneer in a new way of cultivating life beyond the Earth itself. Those possibilities were all gone now, it seemed, but the little tree remained. He would hold it up to the sunlight that streamed in through the windows, and sprinkle precious water from his mouth onto its small leaves. If he rubbed the leaves between his fingers, he could smell their tang, and he was reminded of home.